Leaving the subway station,
the tile floor is bandaged
with hundreds of magazines
all featuring Britney Spears,
and the headline,
“Living with Mental Illness.”
Trapped
between the covers
I realize I have
stepped over a dead bird —
a wingbeat from the exit.
( this begins excerpts from my fourth book, The World Is So Poetic — as determined by you)
All you lyricists
who sing to get by
I am not one of you
I claw at stars to find what lies behind the sky
You philosophers who
chase the question why
do not wait for my reply
I am busy tearing the foundation to get to what is behind
You glorious beauties
who beguile us in this your time
do not look behind
you won’t like what you find
I will not stay long
continue this song too long
one thought to remind you
when you are done what did you find behind you
Why do you give up so easily?
Do you think it easy to lay
waste to the castle of love,
do you think love waits so eagerly?
Anticipates you as its arrival?
Love’s plans are not so easily made.
If you seek treasure, seek peril, it’s easier.
If you seek truth, seek faith, it’s easier.
If you seek beauty, buy it, it’s easier.
But if you seek love, you will pay
in pain,
in rapture,
in exposure,
in humiliation,
in glory,
but only if you play to win.
No matter how many wonderful things
I see every day,
all the interaction—
I crave you;
I need your touch.
Salute those who read the end of the book first.
They seek a reason to read.
This is the back of the book,
the mantle that is the crust.
Throw upon the weight,
the detritus of words and thought,
let them be sediment and the rest of us wash
that scribbles between the lines.
You who look for an index
are bound to be disappointed—
crumbs do not make a sandwich,
finding your way here was no coincidence.
What is the point of starting
if the end is not what you desire?
The brave page resists; a blank page
is not necessarily yours for the ink.
(and so ends “The World is s0 Poetic.” Tomorrow: Book #5)
Stars must be charted from the surface of the water
whose qualities and characteristics most become the ether.
The diamonds of each ripple are equal in increment
to the imagination necessary to filing and describing
constellations as they appear before you. Heaven’s
girdle marks the phosphorescent path we navigate,
polarized scales of fish trace the path of shining waters
pouring upon the ocean, pouring onto the plain, the full gallop
of the panoply of all that seek to run, flame upon the
surface, oil aburst with the glory of its consumption,
earth shattering cataclysms that make chasms and canyons,
that separate now from forever in a book written in shale.
Our passage scribes a shattering of new space where we
reflect, undistorted, each star’s place — endlessly.
My new skeleton grows,
its cells fuse to me,
cleave me into a bridge
to a moment when all
that is mechanical will be
traced to this moment.
When all that is, will be,
heaven unknown, and hell
someone else’s problem.
The punishment continues;
the spirit lives. I am
so easily turned;
I grow into my skin.
Amen.
So little to believe in.
Seems everything we are given
falls away.
Seems everyone we love
can be taken away.
So many things to remind me—
we are born of clay,
easy to crumble,
fragile once fired,
not really clear what we are made for,
so little to show from long ago,
yet each day brings us closer
to the divinity at hand.
I open mine and see
nestled in a wound,
a nail made of iron.
I know this
is something I can hold onto.
This will last.
Bless this age of iron.
We who are to be forged,
bless and remember
the crucible of this open hand.
Oh my son
listening to Debussy
I realize this beauty is a message
from you, “Hello—remember beauty—
the world is suffused with it.”
I see it, but I see it without you
and beauty is no longer transcendent
but dead, and all my ideals simply
forgotten.
I am a greater, and lesser, man than my father —
greater that I am the result of his wishes, the changes
and improvements I made to him; lesser because
of his achievements, his fierce life, all I do not know
about him, his black hair aflame; after my bath he
would lift me, weightless, in his arms, a moment
he gave to me that I will always hold, free, time
less how it resonates, how in his arms I yearned;
how in his arms I learned how a father loves, how
a man holds his son.
Peterborough Poets 